In fact, the veteran actress had to be literally reined in. "Dinah went into a bait shop, got a 12-foot rope and tied it around my waist," recalls Leachman, sounding not unlike her best-known character, flighty landlady Phyllis Lindstrom of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its '70s spin-off Phyllis. "She'd pull me along when she thought I'd spent enough time looking at something!"
Even at home in Los Angeles, Leachman, 73, is chronically distractible. The L-shaped, five-bedroom French country-style house she bought—sight unseen—in 1970 is in a state of perpetual renovation, with French doors and brick walls punctuating mazelike corridors. Hammering carpenters and frequent visits by Leachman's five giggling grandchildren create a cheerful cacophony. "There isn't a front door!" says Dinah. "It's just endless and winding, and so much her personality. It's not a logical house, it's an artist's house, because nothing really works!"
Except, inevitably, the artist herself. Now in her 50th year as an actress, the seven-time Emmy winner recently finished a 2½-year road-show tour of Show Boat, wrapped a costarring role in Hanging Up, a Meg Ryan movie due out at Christmas, and can currently be seen gobbling the scenery on Thanks, a CBS summer sitcom about a family of Pilgrims that features Leachman as Grammy, a cranky—yet still lusty—mother-in-law. "We're huge fans of hers," says executive producer Mark Legan, who cowrote the role with Leachman in mind. "Her performance [as housekeeper Frau Blucher] in [1974's] Young Frankenstein was one of the funniest, out-there comedic performances I have ever seen." And her Oscar-winning turn as lonely small-town housewife Ruth Popper in 1971's The Last Picture Show, says Legan, "was one of the most heartbreaking."
Leachman concluded her Picture Show Oscar acceptance speech by saying, "This is for Buck Leachman, who paid the bills." Her father, Buck, a Des Moines lumber-company owner, and mother, Cloris, a home-maker, both encouraged their oldest daughter to go for an acting scholarship to Northwestern. In her senior year there, she represented Illinois in the 1946 Miss America Pageant. "I was chased around plenty," she says of her suitors back then.
After the pageant, Leachman moved to New York City to pursue a stage career and in 1953 married George Englund, a film producer with whom she had five children: Adam, now 45 and a lawyer; Bryan, an actor who died of unknown causes at age 30; George, 42, who works in TV production; Morgan, 35, an actor-singer who once starred on TV's Guiding Light; and Dinah, 33, a singer-songwriter. "For 14 years," says their mom, "I never took a role that required me to be away more than three days." On TV, the parts ranged from the pre-June Lockhart mom on Lassie to ditzy comic foil Phyllis on Mary Tyler Moore, where, Leachman insists, "there wasn't a whisper of rancor or jealousy."
In Leachman's private life, however, there was heartache. She and Englund divorced in 1979 after 26 years, though they remain friends. ("We're each other's heart," she says.) In 1986, their son Bryan, who had moved to New York City to be closer to his ex-girlfriend and their daughter, died suddenly in a Manhattan YMCA residence. Though police ruled out foul play, the cause of death has never been determined. For years, "I would take to my bed and leak tears," says Leachman. "I don't picture him gone." Nowadays, though, she is buoyant. "I remember as a child never wanting to become an embittered old woman who had nothing but a career," she says. "Here I am, far from it, with all my children and grandchildren. The end is not in sight."
Erik Meers
Paula Yoo in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Paula Yoo.
